Breakfast With Buddha (12 page)

The braided woman who had met us at the curb stood at the front and made sure Rinpoche was comfortably seated in his chair, and then she gave a brief introduction that she’d obviously memorized. “We’re honored tonight to have with us the great spiritual master of our time.” Standing just inside the door, I found that I was surprised. The woman’s
speech sounded like hyperbole to me—though, of course, hyperbole was part and parcel of the introductions of dozens of authors I’d edited. I knew the Rinpoche better than she did, after all, and while he was growing on me a bit, and while he was a perfectly nice fellow if you overlooked his impoliteness as a symptom of cultural misunderstanding, I thought that “the great spiritual master of our time” somehow didn’t quite fit with a guy who, not so long ago, had nearly choked to death in ecstasy over a Hershey’s Kiss; who didn’t get to his appointments on time and didn’t seem to care; who lied to a stranger while he was being given a ride halfway across the country; and who, perhaps, was conning a naive and good-hearted woman, herself one of the actual poor, out of her rightful inheritance.

When the braided beauty finished, there was polite applause and some fidgeting in the rows furthest from the impromptu stage. I had not sat down, was not intending to stay for the talk. Even when I saw how unenticing the options were for an hour of strolling in downtown Youngstown near dusk, I didn’t feel like staying. I don’t know why. When Rinpoche bowed and said he would begin with a ten-minute meditation session, I slipped out the door as unobtrusively as I could manage, went and sat in the car, and studied the map for the best route west. For all I knew they would be holding hands and chanting in there, or sitting cross-legged on the cracked linoleum and envisioning beams of energy winding up around their spinal columns like glorious serpents. Not my style.

There in the car, with the doors locked, I passed an odd hour and a half. Once I finished looking at the map—which took all of about four minutes—there was not much besides the radio to occupy my thoughts, and I’d had enough radio
listening for that day. I did not have a book or newspaper to read and was, I admit, afraid of taking a walk. It was a fear I encountered every week on my trip to the Bronx, even though the tutoring sessions were early on Saturday morning and even though, in the course of six years, nothing untoward, nothing of any significance, at least, had ever happened to me there. Still, I was a well-off white man in a poor black neighborhood, my social standing stamped on my car, clothes, face, and posture as clearly as any mark of poverty, and I felt disliked, guilty, and vulnerable. Something like that feeling had attached itself to me almost as soon as we crossed the Youngstown line on Route 7. I don’t know if anyone else has ever felt this; I assume so. It is not something we talk about at work, where, for the most part, the editors and marketing executives—black, white, Asian, Hispanic, and otherwise—live in Manhattan, or in the commuter-train suburbs to the north, and the shipping and receiving people, the cleaning people, the assistants, and security staff, for the most part, live in certain parts of Queens, or the Bronx, or Harlem, where the life of the street is a very different life. I realize I am on treacherous ground here. I realize I am generalizing and tiptoeing along the edge of the territory into which we never venture very far in the American national conversation: The fact that there are whole neighborhoods into which cabdrivers refuse to take a fare; that there are people among us who live in circumstances we are ashamed to talk about, children who live that way; the fact that there are huge quadrants of our cities where people like me—and not just white people like me—simply do not go, places we do not see, do not want to think about as we are sipping our designer martinis in swanky downtown bistros where dinner for two costs
what these other Americans earn in a week. We excuse it by citing the laws of capital, or by telling ourselves we work harder, or that it is social inequality that serves as the motivation for our national wealth. All good logic, maybe. Still, I’ve always been ill at ease with the vast distance between my life and the lives of other Americans.

I sat there in the car and felt as though I were coated in a kind of thin layer of slime I couldn’t name. How hard would it have been to stand quietly in the back of the room and daydream, I asked myself. How awful would it have been to hold some stranger’s hand for a few minutes and chant? What, exactly, is it that you do not want to hear? And this after giving Rinpoche lectures on American politeness.

Still, I sat there. A ragged and intermittent parade of people went past, all of them men, most of them walking slowly, shuffling almost, almost prowling, looking around as if expecting some opportunity to present itself. Daylight slipped away, and then these solitary specters passed from the darkness of the abandoned part of the block, through the light pouring out of the storefront, and back into darkness again. A few of them peered into the storefront. One even stood there for a while and watched, his face close to the glass. No one went in.

When I thought most of the talk must be over, and when the voice haranguing me for my lack of courage and decency grew persistent, I unlocked the door of the car and quietly made my way back into the lecture hall. Rinpoche had finished the formal part of his presentation and was answering questions.

An elderly black man in the first row raised his hand and said, “A little earlier on you said something I never read in any of your books. You said, if I heard right, that you can
only change about half what happens to you anyway. Or something like that. Could you expand on that for a minute, Rinpoche?”

Rinpoche took a sip of his tea and nodded half a dozen times, but all the while he was looking directly at the man with a sort of intimacy—if that is the correct word—that startled me. I had not seen that kind of a look from him in our time together. And when he started to speak I realized it was in a voice I had not heard from him either. His command of the language was stronger, but it was something more than that, a certain force, a charisma I had missed. To the questioner he said, “Yes, yes. It is this way: I say half but I don’t mean half, exactly. But some, let us say some, okay, yes?
Some
of what you learn in this life you will learn anyway, if you do nothing, if you are not ‘spiritual’, if you don’t meditate, if you don’t care about these things. Even if you murder a person you will learn some of what you have to learn. You will suffer from the guilt of doing that, even if you pretend to yourself that you are not guilty. In the deep of you, you will suffer. If you eat too much you will suffer, and you will learn. If you put into your body drugs, you will suffer and you will learn. If you use your sex in a way that harms someone, you will suffer and you will learn.

“But also the good, you see, also the pleasant. You will love the person you are married to, or your lover, and you will learn. You will love your children, your work, your pleasures in this life, your friends, your hobbies, your sports, your sewing, or your gardening. Each of these things acts as teacher for you. You see this? Each of these things is kind of guru, too, you see? Illness, failure, sorrow, success. Yes. It is not necessary to have any particular spiritual path in this life in order to learn from these things. It is not
essential to have guru, to eat this way or not eat this way, to talk this way or any way. Some part of this education of the spirit in you will happen to you in this life. That is so for every soul.”

Rinpoche paused for a breath, then went on, “But if you care about your mind, you see, if you don’t stir up the energies of your mind by hurting some person or some animal, by using your body in a way that is not healthy way, if you meditate, or say prayers, if you have some quiet in your life instead of keeping all the time busy with noise and errands, if you cultivate good thoughts and feelings where you can instead of bad thoughts and feelings, if you do this then you will . . . what is the word?” Rinpoche glanced back at me as if I might offer it. “
Compound.
Is that right? Yes? You will
compound
your learning. Or
increase,
maybe
increase
is the word in your language. Do you see? It does not mean you are better person than the one who does not do these things. Do not think that. Thinking that will not help you. It means you will squeeze all the juice from this life that there is to squeeze. You will not waste your time here, that you have been given, that is so precious we do not realize until the moment we die. You will not waste this precious time, do you see? This is the best kind of being an environmentalist person. This is not misusing the gifts of this world. Do you see?”

There was reverential nodding all around the small plain room. Everyone saw, apparently. I felt a twist in my intestines that reminded me of the terrible and mysterious stomachaches I’d suffered from as a boy, squirming on the couch in the old farmhouse while my mother heated dishtowels and placed them on my belly. Rinpoche sat back after his long, impassioned answer and calmly sipped his tea. From
the assembled worshippers there was a kind of glow emanating out toward him. And from the back of the room, utterly without knowing I would do so, I said, rather more loudly than I intended, and perhaps less kindly: “And what purpose does all the learning serve?”

Several people turned to look at me, and I cannot say that I felt the same glow of friendliness in their faces. I had not raised my hand and waited for the teacher to call on me, maybe that was the reason.

Rinpoche smiled. “Yes my friend. Very good. He is my friend,” he said, speaking to the crowd now. “His sister, too. Very good friend. Yes. What is the purpose, my friend? The purpose . . .” he paused several beats and tapped on his right thigh with the fingers of his right hand. “The purpose is life itself. This is what life is for, this education of the spirit inside you. Everyone says this. Every teacher in all religions. Life is for to learn, to make a progress, to make a movement toward—”

“But if you don’t compound your learning, it can still be a good life, can’t it?”

There was a murmuring among the faithful. I felt foolish, angry at myself, but could not seem to simply stand there quietly, nodding and adoring.

“Yes, of course. As I said—”

“Then what would be the motivation for someone to do the extra work? I mean, life is hard enough, isn’t it? And what if you’re happy with things the way they are? Why change yourself? Why meditate, or pray, or go to church, or try to alter your thoughts from bad to good if you are happy and decent without doing those things?”

“Ah,” Rinpoche said, and I thought I had him. That was
the phrase that trotted through my mind.
I have him.
He was a nice enough guy, the Rinpoche, probably harmless, but a bit of a phony, I could see that now. The people in the room were the type of people who needed to have someone to call “guru,” the way Cecelia did. It made them feel better about the raw adventure that was actual life. It was a kind of safety blanket, one that people like me did not require.

Rinpoche sipped his tea calmly and deliberately, then looked up and sent a beaming smile my way. But I was not about to be disarmed so easily. “You are a good man,” he said, fixing the same direct look on me that he had fixed on the previous questioner. It made me strangely angry to hear him say that. I was being worked, manipulated. “You do not hurt people,” he went on. “You love very much your wife and your children and your work and your sister. I know this about you. Yes, you eat a little too much, my friend.” He laughed, and by this point the entire crowd had turned around to look at me and they were laughing, too, and—this was exceedingly strange and done out of embarrassment perhaps—I found myself putting my hands on my belly as if it were much bigger than it is and shaking it. “Yes, a little too much,” he went on, “but you do good instead of bad. Tell me, why do you?”

A silence fell over the room. I thought at first, I hoped, that the question had been a rhetorical one, but as the silence persisted I realized the Rinpoche wanted an answer. The problem was that no answer came to mind. When the silence became difficult to bear I said, “I’m not sure.”

“Not sure,” Rinpoche said. “Not sure is all right.” He laughed, and the crowd laughed with him. “But when you understand why a person like you chooses the good and
not the bad, then you will have your answer to your own question. Think about it now, my friend. Tomorrow I will ask you again and you will answer me, yes?”

“Sure, okay,” I said, but something was burning in me, giving off an acrid, invisible smoke. My thoughts spun in little spiteful circles, so much so that I did not really pay attention to the last two questions and refused to let myself eat any of the not-too-unhealthy snacks that were offered on a side table when the whole performance was finished. I loitered at the edges of the room like a boy at a high school dance, not wanting to be rejected, or rejected again, or laughed at, feeling somehow superior in his shame and embarrassment and envy and shyness. Furious, superior, and ashamed. It was not like me at all.

FIFTEEN

By the time
the final question had been asked and answered, I was anxious to get back on the road, and angry without knowing why. As if to spite me, Rinpoche lingered for a long time after he’d finished his presentation, talking to people near the refreshment table, chuckling, answering questions, putting a hand on shoulders, accepting reverent bows. After a while, I went out and stood on the sidewalk in the cooler night air, just stood there and looked out at the devastation. What had happened here? How could something like this happen in America?

I was hungry. And I felt vaguely as if I had sinned—and believe me, that is not a term I use. With their empty interiors and dirty plywood eyes, the fine old stone buildings on Youngstown’s main drag somehow seemed to mirror me: nice enough on the outside, architecturally pleasing and structurally sound, but with some hollowed out places where the rats ran. Why should I have such a feeling? I was not a bad man. Standing there, waiting for the festivities within to come to their smiling conclusion, I carried on an
argument with myself. I had done nothing wrong. On the contrary, with only the mildest of fuss I’d rearranged my schedule to get Rinpoche to his talk more or less on time in spite of the fact that he’d been holding on to the letter from my sister for almost two days and had not thought to mention it. True, I had pressed him a little with my questioning, but wasn’t that what the whole thing had been for? What was I supposed to do, just go along with it like the rest of the people in the room? Accept everything he said because he was supposed to be a spiritual master? That wasn’t my style, not at all. My style was to ask, to analyze, to question, to weigh all sides of an issue, and if something didn’t seem like the real truth, to squeeze it until the lie showed itself plainly. Where was the sin in that? I had been respectful, and more honest, it seemed to me, than the other people in the room. Rinpoche hadn’t seemed put off.